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Every day, over a billion people use Google Messages to communicate. That’s why we’ve made security a top priority, building in powerful on-device, AI-powered filters and advanced security that protects users from 2 billion suspicious messages a month. With end-to-end encrypted1 RCS conversations, you can communicate privately with other Google Messages RCS users. And we’re not stopping there. We’re committed to constantly developing new controls and features to make your conversations on Google Messages even more secure and private.
As part of cybersecurity awareness month, we’re sharing five new protections to help keep you safe while using Google Messages on Android:
- Enhanced detection protects you from package delivery and job scams. Google Messages is adding new protections against scam texts that may seem harmless at first but can eventually lead to fraud. For Google Messages beta users2, we’re rolling out enhanced scam detection, with improved analysis of scammy texts, starting with a focus on package delivery and job seeking messages. When Google Messages suspects a potential scam text, it will automatically move the message into your spam folder or warn you. Google Messages uses on-device machine learning models to classify these scams, so your conversations stay private and the content is never sent to Google unless you report spam. We’re rolling this enhancement out now to Google Messages beta users who have spam protection enabled.
- Intelligent warnings alert you about potentially dangerous links. In the past year, we’ve been piloting more protections for Google Messages users when they receive text messages with potentially dangerous links. In India, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore, Google Messages warns users when they get a link from unknown senders and blocks messages with links from suspicious senders. We’re in the process of expanding this feature globally later this year.
- Controls to turn off messages from unknown international senders. In some cases, scam text messages come from international numbers. Soon, you will be able to automatically hide messages from international senders who are not existing contacts so you don’t have to interact with them. If enabled, messages from international non-contacts will automatically be moved to the “Spam & blocked” folder. This feature will roll out first as a pilot in Singapore later this year before we look at expanding to more countries.
- Sensitive Content Warnings give you control over seeing and sending images that may contain nudity. At Google, we aim to provide users with a variety of ways to protect themselves against unwanted content, while keeping them in control of their data. This is why we’re introducing Sensitive Content Warnings for Google Messages.
Sensitive Content Warnings is an optional feature that blurs images that may contain nudity before viewing, and then prompts with a “speed bump” that contains help-finding resources and options, including to view the content. When the feature is enabled, and an image that may contain nudity is about to be sent or forwarded, it also provides a speed bump to remind users of the risks of sending nude imagery and preventing accidental shares.
All of this happens on-device to protect your privacy and keep end-to-end encrypted message content private to only sender and recipient. Sensitive Content Warnings doesn’t allow Google access to the contents of your images, nor does Google know that nudity may have been detected. This feature is opt-in for adults, managed via Android Settings, and is opt-out for users under 18 years of age. Sensitive Content Warnings will be rolling out to Android 9+ devices including Android Go devices3 with Google Messages in the coming months.
- More confirmation about who you’re messaging. To help you avoid sophisticated messaging threats where an attacker tries to impersonate one of your contacts, we’re working to add a contact verifying feature to Android. This new feature will allow you to verify your contacts’ public keys so you can confirm you’re communicating with the person you intend to message. We’re creating a unified system for public key verification across different apps, which you can verify through QR code scanning or number comparison. This feature will be launching next year for Android 9+ devices, with support for messaging apps including Google Messages.
These are just some of the new and upcoming features that you can use to better protect yourself when sending and receiving messages. Download Google Messages from the Google Play Store to enjoy these protections and controls and learn more about Google Messages here.
Notes
Watch out for schemes where fraudsters trick people into sharing verification codes so they can gain access to their phone numbers
The average time it takes attackers to weaponize a vulnerability, either before or after a patch is released, shrank from 63 days in 2018-2019 to just five days last year
Error-prone interactions between software and memory1 are widely understood to create safety issues in software. It is estimated that about 70% of severe vulnerabilities2 in memory-unsafe codebases are due to memory safety bugs. Malicious actors exploit these vulnerabilities and continue to create real-world harm. In 2023, Google’s threat intelligence teams conducted an industry-wide study and observed a close to all-time high number of vulnerabilities exploited in the wild. Our internal analysis estimates that 75% of CVEs used in zero-day exploits are memory safety vulnerabilities.
At Google, we have been mindful of these issues for over two decades, and are on a journey to continue advancing the state of memory safety in the software we consume and produce. Our Secure by Design commitment emphasizes integrating security considerations, including robust memory safety practices, throughout the entire software development lifecycle. This proactive approach fosters a safer and more trustworthy digital environment for everyone.
This post builds upon our previously reported Perspective on Memory Safety, and introduces our strategic approach to memory safety.
Our journey so far
Google’s journey with memory safety is deeply intertwined with the evolution of the software industry itself. In our early days, we recognized the importance of balancing performance with safety. This led to the early adoption of memory-safe languages like Java and Python, and the creation of Go. Today these languages comprise a large portion of our code, providing memory safety among other benefits. Meanwhile, the rest of our code is predominantly written in C++, previously the optimal choice for high-performance demands.
We recognized the inherent risks associated with memory-unsafe languages and developed tools like sanitizers, which detect memory safety bugs dynamically, and fuzzers like AFL and libfuzzer, which proactively test the robustness and security of a software application by repeatedly feeding unexpected inputs. By open-sourcing these tools, we’ve empowered developers worldwide to reduce the likelihood of memory safety vulnerabilities in C and C++ codebases. Taking this commitment a step further, we provide continuous fuzzing to open-source projects through OSS-Fuzz, which helped get over 8800 vulnerabilities identified and subsequently fixed across 850 projects.
Today, with the emergence of high-performance memory-safe languages like Rust, coupled with a deeper understanding of the limitations of purely detection-based approaches, we are focused primarily on preventing the introduction of security vulnerabilities at scale.
Going forward: Google’s two-pronged approach
Google’s long-term strategy for tackling memory safety challenges is multifaceted, recognizing the need to address both existing codebases and future development, while maintaining the pace of business.
Our long-term objective is to progressively and consistently integrate memory-safe languages into Google’s codebases while phasing out memory-unsafe code in new development. Given the amount of C++ code we use, we anticipate a residual amount of mature and stable memory-unsafe code will remain for the foreseeable future.
Graphic of memory-safe language growth as memory-unsafe code is hardened and gradually decreased over time.
Migration to Memory-Safe Languages (MSLs)
The first pillar of our strategy is centered on further increasing the adoption of memory-safe languages. These languages drastically drive down the risk of memory-related errors through features like garbage collection and borrow checking, embodying the same Safe Coding3 principles that successfully eliminated other vulnerability classes like cross-site scripting (XSS) at scale. Google has already embraced MSLs like Java, Kotlin, Go, and Python for a large portion of our code.
Our next target is to ramp up memory-safe languages with the necessary capabilities to address the needs of even more of our low-level environments where C++ has remained dominant. For example, we are investing to expand Rust usage at Google beyond Android and other mobile use cases and into our server, application, and embedded ecosystems. This will unlock the use of MSLs in low-level code environments where C and C++ have typically been the language of choice. In addition, we are exploring more seamless interoperability with C++ through Carbon, as a means to accelerate even more of our transition to MSLs.
In Android, which runs on billions of devices and is one of our most critical platforms, we’ve already made strides in adopting MSLs, including Rust, in sections of our network, firmware and graphics stacks. We specifically focused on adopting memory safety in new code instead of rewriting mature and stable memory-unsafe C or C++ codebases. As we’ve previously discussed, this strategy is driven by vulnerability trends as memory safety vulnerabilities were typically introduced shortly before being discovered.
As a result, the number of memory safety vulnerabilities reported in Android has decreased dramatically and quickly, dropping from more than 220 in 2019 to a projected 36 by the end of this year, demonstrating the effectiveness of this strategic shift. Given that memory-safety vulnerabilities are particularly severe, the reduction in memory safety vulnerabilities is leading to a corresponding drop in vulnerability severity, representing a reduction in security risk.
Risk Reduction for Memory-Unsafe Code
While transitioning to memory-safe languages is the long-term strategy, and one that requires investment now, we recognize the immediate responsibility we have to protect the safety of our billions of users during this process. This means we cannot ignore the reality of a large codebase written in memory-unsafe languages (MULs) like C and C++.
Therefore the second pillar of our strategy focuses on risk reduction & containment of this portion of our codebase. This incorporates:
- C++ Hardening: We are retrofitting safety at scale in our memory-unsafe code, based on our experience eliminating web vulnerabilities. While we won’t make C and C++ memory safe, we are eliminating sub-classes of vulnerabilities in the code we own, as well as reducing the risks of the remaining vulnerabilities through exploit mitigations.
We have allocated a portion of our computing resources specifically to bounds-checking the C++ standard library across our workloads. While bounds-checking overhead is small for individual applications, deploying it at Google’s scale requires significant computing resources. This underscores our deep commitment to enhancing the safety and security of our products and services. Early results are promising, and we’ll share more details in a future post.
In Chrome, we have also been rolling out MiraclePtr over the past few years, which effectively mitigated 57% of use-after-free vulnerabilities in privileged processes, and has been linked to a decrease of in-the-wild exploits.
- Security Boundaries: We are continuing4 to strengthen critical components of our software infrastructure through expanded use of isolation techniques like sandboxing and privilege reduction, limiting the potential impact of vulnerabilities. For example, earlier this year, we shipped the beta release of our V8 heap sandbox and included it in Chrome’s Vulnerability Reward Program.
- Bug Detection: We are investing in bug detection tooling and innovative research such as Naptime and making ML-guided fuzzing as effortless and wide-spread as testing. While we are increasingly shifting towards memory safety by design, these tools and techniques remain a critical component of proactively identifying and reducing risks, especially against vulnerability classes currently lacking strong preventative controls.
In addition, we are actively working with the semiconductor and research communities on emerging hardware-based approaches to improve memory safety. This includes our work to support and validate the efficacy of Memory Tagging Extension (MTE). Device implementations are starting to roll out, including within Google’s corporate environment. We are also conducting ongoing research into Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions (CHERI) architecture which can provide finer grained memory protections and safety controls, particularly appealing in security-critical environments like embedded systems.
Looking ahead
We believe it’s important to embrace the opportunity to achieve memory safety at scale, and that it will have a positive impact on the safety of the broader digital ecosystem. This path forward requires continuous investment and innovation to drive safety and velocity, and we remain committed to the broader community to walk this path together.
We will provide future publications on memory safety that will go deeper into specific aspects of our strategy.
Notes
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Anderson, J. Computer Security Technology Planning Study Vol II. ESD-TR-73-51, Vol. II, Electronic Systems Division, Air Force Systems Command, Hanscom Field, Bedford, MA 01730 (Oct. 1972).
https://seclab.cs.ucdavis.edu/projects/history/papers/ande72.pdf ↩
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https://www.memorysafety.org/docs/memory-safety/#how-common-are-memory-safety-vulnerabilities ↩
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Kern, C. 2024. Developer Ecosystems for Software Safety. Commun. ACM 67, 6 (June 2024), 52–60. https://doi.org/10.1145/3651621 ↩
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Barth, Adam, et al. “The security architecture of the chromium browser.” Technical report. Stanford University, 2008.
https://seclab.stanford.edu/websec/chromium/chromium-security-architecture.pdf ↩
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Janine Roberta Ferreira was driving home from work in São Paulo when she stopped at a traffic light. A man suddenly appeared and broke the window of her unlocked car, grabbing her phone. She struggled with him for a moment before he wrestled the phone away and ran off. The incident left her deeply shaken. Not only was she saddened at the loss of precious data, like pictures of her nephew, but she also felt vulnerable knowing her banking information was on her phone that was just stolen by a thief.
Situations like Janine’s highlighted the need for a comprehensive solution to phone theft that exceeded existing tools on any platform. Phone theft is a widespread concern in many countries – 97 phones are robbed or stolen every hour in Brazil. The GSM Association reports millions of devices stolen every year, and the numbers continue to grow.
With our phones becoming increasingly central to storing sensitive data, like payment information and personal details, losing one can be an unsettling experience. That’s why we developed and thoroughly beta tested, a full suite of features designed to protect you and your data at every stage – before, during, and after device theft.
These advanced theft protection features are now available to users around the world through Android 15 and a Google Play Services update (Android 10+ devices).
AI-powered protection for your device the moment it is stolen
Theft Detection Lock uses powerful AI to proactively protect you at the moment of a theft attempt. By using on-device machine learning, Theft Detection Lock is able to analyze various device signals to detect potential theft attempts. If the algorithm detects a potential theft attempt on your unlocked device, it locks your screen to keep thieves out.
To protect your sensitive data if your phone is stolen, Theft Detection Lock uses device sensors to identify theft attempts. We’re working hard to bring this feature to as many devices as possible. This feature is rolling out gradually to ensure compatibility with various devices, starting today with Android devices that cover 90% of active users worldwide. Check your theft protection settings page periodically to see if your device is currently supported.
In addition to Theft Detection Lock, Offline Device Lock protects you if a thief tries to take your device offline to extract data or avoid a remote wipe via Android’s Find My Device. If an unlocked device goes offline for prolonged periods, this feature locks the screen to ensure your phone can’t be used in the hands of a thief.
If your Android device does become lost or stolen, Remote Lock can quickly help you secure it. Even if you can’t remember your Google account credentials in the moment of theft, you can use any device to visit Android.com/lock and lock your phone with just a verified phone number. Remote Lock secures your device while you regain access through Android’s Find My Device – which lets you secure, locate or remotely wipe your device. As a security best practice, we always recommend backing up your device on a continuous basis, so remotely wiping your device is not an issue.
These features are now available on most Android 10+ devices1 via a Google Play Services update and must be enabled in settings.
Advanced security to deter theft before it happens
Android 15 introduces new security features to deter theft before it happens by making it harder for thieves to access sensitive settings, apps, or reset your device for resale:
- Changes to sensitive settings like Find My Device now require your PIN, password, or biometric authentication.
- Multiple failed login attempts, which could be a sign that a thief is trying to guess your password, will lock down your device, preventing unauthorized access.
- And enhanced factory reset protection makes it even harder for thieves to reset your device without your Google account credentials, significantly reducing its resale value and protecting your data.
Later this year, we’ll launch Identity Check, an opt-in feature that will add an extra layer of protection by requiring biometric authentication when accessing critical Google account and device settings, like changing your PIN, disabling theft protection, or accessing Passkeys from an untrusted location. This helps prevent unauthorized access even if your device PIN is compromised.
Real-world protection for billions of Android users
By integrating advanced technology like AI and biometric authentication, we’re making Android devices less appealing targets for thieves to give you greater peace of mind. These theft protection features are just one example of how Android is working to provide real-world protection for everyone. We’re dedicated to working with our partners around the world to continuously improve Android security and help you and your data stay safe.
You can turn on the new Android theft features by clicking here on a supported Android device. Learn more about our theft protection features by visiting our help center.
Notes
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Android Go smartphones, tablets and wearables are not supported ↩
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